Still brooding about England’s defeat, I went to Cape Town last night to watch Spain play Portugal. I find that at this stage in the competition, a sort of fellow feeling settles in amongst the followers of defeated nations. On the plane down, I sat next to some Chileans who were still licking their wounds, after their team’s 3-0 defeat by Brazil the previous night. They told me that England had been unlucky; I told them that Chile had been unlucky. Near the ground, a bunch of fans in Mexican shirts noticed my England scarf – and we jointly cursed the referees in this competition, and agreed that both our teams had been victims of incompetence or worse. Then queuing to get into the ground I got chatting to a Japanese fan, who had just seen his team go out on penalties to Paraguay. I told him how impressed I had been by Honda, the Japanese forward. “He’s called Honda, but he plays like a Ferrari,” replied the fan, who was over from Tokyo for the week. Read more